Fabrics such as artist's canvases have been mounted and displayed on walls using a variety of devices and methods. In recent years, inkjet canvas prints or “giclees,” have become increasingly popular. They are mass produced and relatively inexpensive when compared to currently available mounting and framing options. Canvases are usually stretched on four-sided frames in order to make the image surface as flat as possible. This often requires professional expertise and adds the inconvenience of working with a frame shop. Furthermore, merely stretching the canvas does not provide decorative framing. Frames need to be purchased separately, further adding to the overall cost of displaying images. In most cases, these extra expenses by far exceed the cost of the canvas prints themselves.
There are several Do-It-Yourself (DIY) canvas stretcher frame kits available for professional and amateur consumers on the market today, but they can be expensive, time consuming, and complicated to assemble. Also, most kits employ a four-sided frame, which greatly limits the size options for the user, in both length and width dimensions. For example, long panoramic works or mural size images cannot be accommodated by these DIY kits at all, and instead require custom-built frames. When these large mounted artworks need to be shipped, there are additional challenges, including shipping size restrictions and costly surcharges for oversized packages. Mural sized artwork can also be painted directly on a wall, or a large scaled fabric can be adhered to the wall. These methods present the problems of the paint medium, the challenge of the materials to be adhered, and the difficulty removing and saving artwork if a building is modified or demolished. Therefore, there remains a need for versatile and cost-effective Do-It-Yourself stretcher frame kits that allow for canvases of any size to be easily mounted and framed on the wall and just as easily to be disassembled for moving or shipping.